The M+G+R Foundation

The Return to
"Christendom":
The State and Church Alliance

A False Hope for
the Faithful

Many Christian
conservatives are greatly
vexed by the moral decay which worsened during the last century, and
they
are looking back with nostalgia to "Christendom" - an alliance between
State and Church in which the spiritual and temporal powers work
together
to establish and spread the Faith. Often, traditionalists look
toward
a future re-establishment of such a "Christian order" as mankind's best
hope; they console themselves in the present chaos with the expectation
of a "Great King" and a "Holy Pontiff" who will set the world to
rights after God punishes his liberal, atheist, secular, decadent
enemies. (1)

These hopes for a new
"Christendom"
are grossly misguided. Force and temporal power are not the way
to
spread the Faith and draw people to the love of Christ - as
Jesus Himself repeatedly showed by word and example.

"Christendom" has been tried
before,
and it has never worked very well for long. Consider these
precedents:

1. Constantine and his
successors "Christianized"
the Roman Empire after 312.

The
barbarians sacked Rome less than
100 years later, and the Western Empire ended in 476.

A present-day historian of the fall of Rome says, "Unsurprisingly, the
defeats and disasters of the first half of the fifth century
shocked the Roman world. The reaction can be charted most fully
in the perplexed response of Christian writers to some obvious
and awkward questions. Why had God, so soon after the suppression
of the public pagan cults (in 391) unleashed the scourge
of the barbarians on a Christian empire, and why did the horrors of
invasion afflict the just as harshly as they did the unjust?"

The historian, Bryan Ward-Perkins, notes that there was a large scale
"literary response to these difficult questions," and
commented on the "ingenious nature of some of the answers that were
produced." (1A)

During the late 300s and early 400s, the Church went from being
persecuted to being a
persecutor.
"The late empire was a totalitarian state, in some ways an oriental
despotism."(2)
The Empire used violence against the Donatist heretics, and St.
Augustine
"became the theorist of persecution; and his defences were later to be
those on which all defences of the Inquisition
rested. ... He insisted that the use of force in the
pursuit of Christian unity,
and
indeed total religious conformity, was necessary, efficacious, and
wholly
justified."(3)

2. Byzantium survived the
calamity
in the West, and expanded under the Emperor Justinian.

However,
Byzantium
suffered great plagues in the mid-500s, and the rise of the Islamic
empire
in the 600s and 700s. If the
Christian empire had been meeting the physical and spiritual needs of
the
people, would the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain have fallen to
Muslim
arms within 100 years after Mohammed died? [One conservative
American
commentator illustrated the problem several decades ago; he said that
Byzantium
"was wealthy, and for some it was pleasant, but it was cruel. The
oppression of class by class seems to have been bitter and continuous,
and its legal punishments were among the most barbarous and inhumane
known
to history."(4)]

3. Those who romanticize the
Middle
Ages and traditional Western Christendom say that Christian
civilization
reached its peak in the 1200s.

In
1907, the Catholic apologist James
Walsh hailed the 13th Century as the "greatest of centuries."(5)
It was the age of saints and cathedrals, but it was also the age of
Crusades
(including the sack of Constantinople in 1204, which made the East/West
schism permanent, and fatally weakened the Eastern empire, guaranteeing
its fall in 1453), Inquisition (founded in 1231 by Pope Gregory IX, and
managed by the Dominicans and the Franciscans, the "new ecclesial
movements"
of the day), and the Imperial Papacy.

The
claims of the Papacy reached their
apogee in 1302, when Boniface VIII said in his bull Unam Sanctam that
the
Church is to wield

"...a
spiritual and a material sword. But the latter, indeed,
must be exercised for the Church, the former by the Church. The former
(by the hand) of the priest, the latter by the hand of kings and
soldiers,
but at the will and sufferance of the priest. For it is necessary that
a sword be under a sword and that temporal authority be subject to
spiritual
power". ... It is necessary that we confess the more clearly
that spiritual power precedes any earthly power both in dignity and
nobility,
as spiritual matters themselves excel the temporal. ...
Furthermore,
we declare, say, define, and proclaim to every human creature
that they by necessity for salvation are entirely subject to the Roman
Pontiff."(6)

All
of this ecclesiastical power did not prevent the Black
Death of 1348-1350 (a plague that killed about 1/3 of Europe and
prepared
the way for the break-up of the medieval order), nor the Great Schism
of
1378-1417
(in which there were multiple "popes" in the Western church), nor the
brutal 1527 sacking of Rome and the Vatican by the Emperor of the Holy
Roman-German Empire, Charles V, nor the
rise
of Wycliffe and Hus, spiritual ancestors of the Protestant Reformation.

4. European imperialists had
colonized
the globe by 1900, and were "Christianizing" the natives in Africa and
Asia - an arrangement that World War I began to unravel, and that World
War II and its aftermath ended. "Christian Europe" slaughtered
itself
in the trenches of World War I, leading the poet Thomas Hardy to lament
in 1924,

"After
two thousand years of massWe've got as far as poison gas."(7)

IN
CONCLUSION

Constantine's Roman Empire,
Byzantium,
medieval Christendom, and the imperial Christianity of the pre-1914 era
- all came to a bloody end.

If these ventures had been as
pleasing
to God as their leaders claimed, God would have prospered and protected
these "Christian" empires. Instead, he allowed them to come
crashing
down in ruin, usually in a century or less..

Others may read these
precedents differently: They see in
them a tale of the miraculous
preservation of the Church amid trials, and despite the relentless
attacks
of Satan against Christian order. This view, however, assumes
that
Satan is powerful enough to work his will freely, and that God
does
not bless and save His people in any way that is discernible in history.

I believe, on the contrary,
that as
Isaiah taught:

"Behold,
the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot
save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have
made
a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face
from you so that he does not hear. For your hands are defiled with
blood
and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue
mutters wickedness. No one enters suit justly, no one goes to law
honestly;
they rely on empty pleas, they speak lies, they conceive mischief and
bring
forth iniquity. They hatch adders' eggs, they weave the spider's web;
he
who eats their eggs dies, and from one which is crushed a viper is
hatched.
Their webs will not serve as clothing; men will not cover themselves
with
what they make. Their works are works of iniquity, and deeds of
violence
are in their hands. Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed
innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, desolation and
destruction are in their highways. The way of peace they know not, and
there is no justice in their paths; they have made their roads crooked,
no one who goes in them knows peace." [Is.
59:1-8]

I will venture this
prediction: If a global
"Christendom" is established (as some Christian conservatives
and traditionalists hope), God will bring it down in ruin, and great
will
be its fall.

The higher we men build our
Towers of Babel, and the
more trust we put in them, the greater the ensuing calamity for those
who
make their residence in Babylon and trust in its power.